On your way to work this morning, you checked in with your peeps and your tweeps. You told them you were wearing your lucky shirt, you asked for good wishes, then you hit “send” and posted it on Facebook and Twitter for all to see. But aside from your followers – who cares? Nobody, says author Jeffrey Gitomer, which means you’re wasting valuable resources.
In his book “Social BOOM!” he shows how better postings on social media can mean better postings at the bank. Every day, you spend a few minutes amusing your friends online with your wryly observant posts. Fun, huh? Now imagine what would happen if you used those same few minutes to reach thousands of prospective clients instead.
According to Gitomer, there are four keys to business social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Use all four efficiently, simultaneously, and with great frequency “…or BOOM! will never happen...”
Facebook, he says, is the easiest to understand and use. Chances are you already have a personal page, but BOOM! requires a second page, on which you’ll post information of value to your clients and prospects. Give them something useful and they’ll run to your door. LinkedIn is purely a business social site; in fact, you’re not technically allowed to link with someone you don’t already know. LinkedIn is simple to use, and the beauty of it is that you can join groups of like-minded people and search for prospects in the database. Don’t forget, Gitomer says, to completely fill out your profile.
You might think Twitter and YouTube are just for kids, but Gitomer insists that both are important tools for business. If one of your tweets is re-tweeted, it automatically expands your audience (and your prospects) to the hundreds of thousands. And think about how convenient it would be to let new customers see a video of your business any time they wanted. “… if done correctly, business social media puts you in a direct one-on-one contact with paying customers,” says Gitomer. “That’s a game plan you can take to the bank.”
Undoubtedly, the information you’ll find in “Social BOOM!” is useful. You don’t need a PhD in computers to do it. All you need, the author says, is time. But, judging by most indications, it’s going to take a lot of that. Gitomer states that you only need an hour a day, but this book advises readers to peruse blogs, post multiple times a day, “follow” people and comment on their posts, make frequent YouTube videos, and update often. That one hour a day could quickly become all day.
Still, employing just a fraction of what you’ll learn here can only help. Just dipping your toe into the tech pool may lead to some good leads. And most importantly, as Gitomer points out, business social media is free. I think there are nuggets of goodness inside “Social BOOM!” but only if used wisely and judiciously. If you’re new to social media or want a few tips on using it, peep this book.
The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. Terri has been reading since she was three years old and she never goes anywhere without a book. She lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 12,000 books.